I stumbled upon this quote by Béla Tarr on A Bitter Sweet Life:
I don’t care about stories. I never did. Every story is the same. We have no new stories. We’re just repeating the same ones. I really don’t think, when you do a movie that you have to think about the story. The film isn’t the story. It’s mostly picture, sound, a lot of emotions.
And, I remembered that one of the first movies that made me feel the same was Peter Greenway’s The Pillow Book, beautiful to behold and impossible to forget. I can’t remember the story but I do remember feeling spellbound by its visual poetry and the idea of being a living book. Greenway employs multiple aspect ratios, picture-in-picture compositions, and superimposed calligraphy that transforms the screen into a living, breathing manuscript. Bodies become canvases, and ink becomes an extension of desire. The film’s approach to visual composition mimics the practice of calligraphy itself—disciplined yet sensual, structured yet flowing with emotion.
It took me another 10 years to get my first tattoo and it was not a written one. I had a leopard done in Johannesburg because I was born in South Africa and the leopard is one of the Big 5. When I finally decided to have something written, I was in San Diego in 2014. For a full 5 hours or so, someone patiently wrote Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act 5 Scene 5 on the right side of my rib cage. Surprisingly, there was no pain. The tattooer, who was very young, asked why I had chosen such a strange thing. I wanted to be constantly reminded of the fleeting nature of life and meaning, I said.
After I got divorced, Richard II was written on my right tight under the leopard. I wasted time and now doth time waste me.
My last one was done in 2024, a very common tattoo written under a flamenco dancer on my left rib cage. Tennessee Williams’ first verses of A Prayer for The Wild at Heart. The tattoo artist thought that having the whole poem would be over the top.
I wanted to show, even though they are not visible, that for me there’s nothing more important than literature. Particularly the one exploring human struggles, mortality, and the desire for freedom.
The “Pillow Book” connection made perfect sense now – like the film, I was using my body as a canvas for meaningful text. Yes, I could use paper, but text on skin becomes something more intimate and embodied than words on a page. I also see them as a way of relating my reminder’s of life’s impermanence and the tension between duty and desire to the struggles of everyone else.
I am now thinking of getting a tattoo of goddess Athena. I have to find suitable words.
There. There you are. You have just dropped a marker pin on your body, to reclaim yourself, to remind you where you are: inside yourself. Somewhere. Somewhere in there
Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
Stories from A Closet of Errors 